Dudspuds Blog

The 2008 FSTA Winter conference went well. I received great questions and feedback from writers, publishers and other businesses in the industry. It’s been a while since the show, so I wanted to provide an update on where things are today.

After neglecting Dudspuds the last few months (while doing paying work), I’m building my plan for the rest of the 2008 and 2009. I believe in this marketplace concept, and will continue to prove it out. Here are some things on the agenda:

Steady Content Flow

One major challenge I face is having a steady flow of valuable content from publishers and writers into the marketplace. Getting their content on the site is labor intensive. While this can be resolved through technology (i.e. XML) the effort isn’t feasible for publishers when there is no guaranteed revenues. My challenge is to minimize their effort, while getting their content loaded quickly for readers.

This sounds like the job for a custom web crawler that turns the article into a marketplace offering for that respective publisher.

Republishing Content

I plan to expand the marketplace by allowing writers to sell articles to publishers. This will cover re-publish rights, exclusive rights, online/off line rights and limited number of sales per article – all controlled by the writer.

Private Label Marketplaces

We’re working on allowing 3^rd party organizations to create their own, privately-branded marketplace using Dudspuds technology. Everything will work the same, except the marketplace won’t look like Dudspuds – it will have 3^rd party’s logo, colors and domain (http://xyzsite.dudspuds.com/).

Dudspuds is excited to announce our participation in the 2008 FSTA Business Conference on February 11th and 12th in Denver, CO.

We’ll be formally launching Dudspuds during the “Pitch Me” panel and we’ll have an exhibit at the conference where you can see a product demonstration, pick up some literature, and - most importantly - get one of our free aluminum bottle openers.

We’re excited to be involved in this event and hope to generate some buzz around Dudspuds.

With baseball season right around the corner, you’ll soon begin seeing premium fantasy baseball articles available in the marketplace. Be sure to check them out, and take advantage of our $2 sign-up bonus.

Here’s our first ever incentive program, starting today.

• Sign-up Bonus
• Applies to all new sign-ups at Dudspuds.com
• $2 is automatically deposited into your account
• You can spend the $2 on any articles you want

We’ve done the math, you can buy roughly 8 articles with the two bucks (based on $0.25 average price).  This allows you, as a fantasy sports player, to try out the marketplace before using your own money.  The first group of articles are on the house, and we’re happy to offer them.

Just create an account and spend like a rock star.

Don’t forget to rate articles you read by clicking the stars on the article page (1 = “worthless” to  5 =  “very useful”).  The ratings are important as they tell others what’s good, and what stinks, and they tell the system what kind of articles you like.

We need feedback, so give us your thoughts at: info [at] dudspuds.com or post in the comments on this blog entry.

Now that we’re in full swing with our first two publishers, we’d like to announce a major milestone. The Dudspuds marketplace now offers over 60 premium articles per week, with the average price of $0.24 each.

Bumps in the Road

There were a good number of performance problems with the publisher tools that required several coding iterations. This was primarily around very long articles, and when you tried loading them - the system would crap out. Well - we’ve solved all these issues and now you can load articles as long as you want (although we haven’t tried one that is the length of Encyclopedia Britannica). To further speed things up, we added some clever link processing that can automatically associate players and teams to your articles.

Moving forward, I intend to pursue more publishers to increase the number of premium articles offered each week. This will include publishers that do content for fantasy baseball, in preparation for next season.

In addition, I am going to put the word out to friends (and friends of friends) that the marketplace is open for business, and please give it a try. I’m cooking up a bonus program that will give new customers free money when they setup an account and fund it with a few bucks. I plan to introduce this program next week, and will post about it.

More Features to Come

On another note - expect to start seeing new features on the customer facing screens. Some of the things on the slate include…

• Daily e-mail to consumers with new articles for sale
• More efficient search results listing
• Improved placement of star ratings

This week, we soft-launched our marketplace for fantasy sports content. We have not yet loaded content on the site — as we’re getting organized with several publishers to kick things off. Rest assured, content is on the way.  I know - it couldn’t be here soon enough with football season starting, and all.

You may have noticed…  we used an uncoordinated approach to launching the site.  If you see some blank pages - check back within the next couple of days.  We’re working on it.

For anyone who writes or publishes premium fantasy sports content – consider signing up and selling a few of your articles.  You can read more about selling articles to determine if you’d like to give it a shot.